This week has been a particularly soul-destroying week for me, having been searching for a job (the lack of which gives me ample time to write nigh on 2000 word posts) as there is nothing out there in either location I am searching for which doesn’t require 2-5 years experience, and being a fresh-faced graduate, I am sadly lacking in this department.
In order to combat these blues I found refuge in the memories of happier times, watching Disney films and kid’s TV. Sadly my video player got thrown out last week, having been broken for 2 or so years, so hazy memories (and wikipedia and youtube) were all I had to go on.
So, with that in mind, here is 6 lessons learned from kids TV and films...
1: The Lesson: Animals can talk
Where From: Just about every film by Disney.
This is something that I never really thought about until recently, but animals don’t actually talk outside of films (except for a few species of bird, a seal, various cats on youtube, and a number of apes which were taught American Sign Language) and I’m surprised that there aren’t more complaints made about the misrepresentation of animals. Of course I don’t remember a crushing disappointment when my dog first urinated on the floor and failed to apologise in an eloquent manner to my mum, but then again she was a vindictive little bitch (the dog that is) so I probably wouldn’t have been expecting it much.
2: The Lesson: Its alright to be ugly, you will end up being beautiful despite a complete lack of effort.
Where From: The ugly duckling
To me this is one of the most disturbing messages you can give to young children via the medium of cheap vhs (until Disney makes a box office smashing CGI version you’ll have to cope with the cheaper bargain bin variants of the story).
Firstly, it places massive emphasis on the importance of beauty, as the poor little duckling is ostracised for failing to adhere to their duck rules of attractiveness. And whilst this may be a soft way of introducing kids to the notion of discrimination, and the fairytale ending may help soften the blow when at school, little Elizabeth gets spiders put in her hair or whatever the hell kids do nowadays (steal her ipod perhaps?) on the grounds that she’s ginger, there is one fairly significant flaw:
In the story the duckling isn’t a duckling- it’s a swan (or cygnet if you wish to be a pedant). The fact that the ending is happy is not a result of the duckling striving to help itself, the ending is happy because external circumstances beyond the control of the swan (largely a group of ducks’ inability to tell the difference between a duck and a swan) have conspired to improve its life.
Surely this sends a message to children that it’s ok to be obese and spotty, they’ll grow up to be a majestic human equivalent of a swan. “You don’t have to cut down on KFC or go out and get some exercise. Just sit and watch some television and wait yourself thin! Here, have a deep fried kit-kat”.
Yes, I’m blaming the nation’s obesity problems on a single fairy tale.
3: The Lesson: Its alright to be ugly, we’ll simply lock you in a tower. Also no-one will love you, regardless of how you act.
Where From: The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Hunchback of Notre Dame is an interesting film, it is a Disney film that introduces you to the Quasimodo, who like the swan above, fails to adhere to societal norms of attractiveness just because he has a hideous deformity on his back and a lumpy face. The film then shows how wonderful he is, in spite of his ugliness. He meets Esmeralda, and falls for her. Unfortunately, in a twist more likely to occur in a poorly thought out romantic comedy then in a Disney film, Frollo (the religious guy with the silly hat, for those who haven’t seen it in a while) and Phoebus (the preening prick replacement for a prince) also become infatuated with Esmeralda prompting one of the best songs a Disney film:
This is all well and good, Frollo is an insane zealot, and Phoebus, while not evil or insane, is a bit of a douchebag (although having read the synopsis of the book upon which the Disney film is very loosely based, he’s already engaged and simply wants to bone Esmeralda so is technically striving to be a cheating douchebag), and whilst Quasimodo is ugly on the surface, he proves what a noble heart he has by repeatedly saving people and being generally nice.
In what could easily pass for a curiously extreme edition of an MTV dating show, Esmeralda goes off and has a happy ending with Phoebus, Frollo falls to a fiery death (more on that later!) and Quasimodo reverts to his bachelor’s lifestyle, lonely except for some disturbingly animate sentient gargoyles.
Of course, if Disney must take inspiration from books in which the protagonist’s love interest is hanged and he is later uncovered having starved to death while embracing her corpse, then I guess it can be expected that they’ll change it.
4: The Lesson: The laws of righteous men (and lions) are not capable of effectively punishing those who have broken them. So they have to fall off high things.
Where From: A surprisingly large number of kids films and TV programmes, although the most memorable ones for me were Hunchback of Notre Dame, Beauty and the Beast and the Lion King.
This is something that never quite sat comfortably with me as a child, whilst I got as much of a schadenfreude-based kick as the next child when I saw the antagonist at the end of a film fall to a painful death I never really felt that it was right.
In The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, Frollo falls into a raging inferno. In Beauty and The Beast, Gaston falls onto some decidedly pointy looking rocks below. In the Lion King, Scar is literally torn apart by hyenas.
I always felt, even as a child, that an ideal way to portray the infallibility of a Disney hero’s moral compass, and the moral guidelines set down in most Disney films is to follow them, locking up Gaston for inciting a mob (and for being a bit of a poser) and attempting to kill the Beast who, to be fair, was a 9 ft tall teethy thing, may be fair justice. Having him fall several thousand feet onto some unnaturally craggy rocks is not really reasonable. The heroes of Disney films rarely get the chance to actually forgive and the villains of Disney films rarely get a chance to earn forgiveness or show repentance for what they’ve done because they’re too busy falling off unnecessarily high structures.
5: The Lesson: People are fundamentally horrible and are responsible for everything wrong in the world.
Where From: Fern Gully (remember that?), The Animals Of Farthing Wood, Princess Mononoke
Another thing that I always felt uneasy about was the way that humans are portrayed in the above films and programmes, and quite a lot of films in which animals are the main characters.
I have chosen the above films on the grounds that they all have a similar theme around which they base their vilification of man: the environment. The Animals Of Farthing Wood portrays the journey of a group of animals who have put aside their natural instincts to hunt and eat each other to find a nature reserve, as their environment is being built upon. Not content with usurping the eponymous animals, humans proceed to shoot at, drive at, and litter in the general direction of them, causing the numbers to dwindle as the series went on.
Put in a list like that it reads more like the humans are the Nazis in Escape From Colditz than the ignorant, self-centred beings that they more typically are. (On a side note, the humans weren’t the worst, there was a bastard shrike bird that killed all of the baby mice and put them on thorns).
Fern Gully had much the same sort of sponsored-by-Greenpeace feel to it, although it was much more based around fairies’ reaction to having their habitat destroyed than actual animals. Princess Mononoke is a slightly more adult Japanese anime along similar lines, only being Japanese, it has a traumatising amount of hideous tentacles and a guy getting his arms shot off.
also feral children and giant wolves
Again, like the ugly cygnet-who-was-previously-assumed-to-be-a-duckling, I can see the point and the moral of the stories. At this time it is very important to be teaching our children that the environment is precious and irreplaceable, and that we have to live in harmony with it and so on.
I didn’t realise that the ideal method of teaching would be to ingrain horrifying, bloody images into the minds of our children so that they still sometimes see Fox being dragged away by a large bit of driftwood when they close their eyes. 13 years after they originally witnessed it. Thanks mum.
6: The Lesson: Jazz is awesome. Particularly for cats.
Where From: The Aristocats
Having mounted my soapbox several times this week, and delved into far more philosophical territory then I ever intended whilst talking about children’s television, I figured I should end on something I actually like.
I’m not sure how well this transfers to the real world, I am more of a dog person, and therefore have no cat and no idea of how cats react to a mean improvised saxophone solo. I assume that they grab the nearest double bass and start taking the bassline for a walk.
However, I don’t care, the Aristocats for me is the one of a handful of Disney films that hasn’t been ruined by a healthy dose of cynicism in my adolescent years- another one being Robin Hood with its folky soundtrack and the bromance between Robin Hood and Little John (who, like Thomas O’Malley, was voiced by the late Phil Harris) these are films that I still adore without any kind of irony.
I know that cats don’t dance (or if they do, they hide it well when I’m in the room with them), but frankly I don’t care, seeing a group of two-dimensional cats jiving across Parisienne rooftops is all I could possibly want from a film.
Damn it I love a cat with a French accent.
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